The current singularity debate often overlooks the fact that similar debates have been going on in other fields for a long time. This volume examines these references to debates about the unique, the singular, and the individual in philosophy, theology, hermeneutics, and ethics.
Debates about the unique, the singular, and the individual raise epistemological, hermeneutical, metaphysical, ethical, and theological problems. They are often discussed in separate discourses without attention to the multiple relationships that exist among these issues. This volume seeks to remedy this by linking three areas of discussion: the theological and metaphysical debates about divine uniqueness, the epistemological and hermeneutical debates about issues of singularity and (in)comparability, and the ethical debates about issues of human individuality and ethical formation. Taken together, this highlights the complex background of the current singularity debate and shows that it is worth paying attention to debates in other fields where similar questions are explored in a different way.
Table of contents:
Ingolf U. Dalferth: Introduction: The Unique, the Singular, and the Individual
I. Divine Uniqueness
Ayat Agah: On the Essence of God's Names in Islam -
Richard Cross: God and Thisness (haecceity) in Duns Scotus' Philosophy -
Paul Pistone: Duns Scotus on Our Knowledge and the Nature of God -
David Worsley: Knowing the Unknowable (Personally): Divine Ineffability and the Beatific Vision Revisited -
Peter Ochs: Underdetermined Singularity: The Way the Creator Speaks -
Daniel Nelson: Questions of an Interpreter Regarding the Interpretant: From Criticism to Construction -
Randy Ramal: What is so Unique about the Qur'ān? -
Hans-Peter Grosshans: The Concrete Uniqueness of God: The Contribution of Trinitarian Thought -
Thomas Jared Farmer: God and the Self as Social Relation
II. The Singular, the Incomparable, and the Individual
Christopher D. DiBona: A Practice-Based Approach to Human and Divine Singularity: An Emerging Trend in Continental Philosophy and Theology -
Richard T. Livingston: The Pluri-Singular Event in the Cosmo-Theo-Poetic Thinking of Catherine Keller and John Caputo -
Norman Whitman: Singular Knowledge in Maimonides' and Spinoza's Philosophy -
Sean Hannan: Individuating Time: The Indivisible Moment in Augustine and Ancient Atomism -
Hartmut Von Sass: Against Structural Incomparability -
Michael Lodato: Apples, Oranges, and Possible Worlds: Consequences of God's Cosmic Comparison -
Miguel García-Baró: Prolegomena to an Essay on How Mystic Should Be Choral and How Religious Loneliness Must Be Reexamined -
Kirsten Gerdes: Finding Truth Where We Left It
III. The Concrete Individual and the Quest of Ethical Formation
Jacqueline Mariña: Individuality and Subjectivity in the Ethics of Kant and Schleiermacher -
Raymond E. Perrier: The Question of Moral Becoming in Kant's Practical Philosophy -
Laura Martin: Love and Justice in Hegel's »The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate« -
Thomas A. Lewis: The Universal, the Individual, and the Novel: Hegel, Austen, and Ethical Formation -
Robin Lehleitner: Why We Come to Austen -
Elisabeth Gr ä
b-Schmidt: Singularity and Resonance: The Normative Force of the Individual
